


Road Trip at the End of the World

by Zenthisoror



Category: Naruto
Genre: Afterlife, Alternate Ending, Gen, Ghosts, Journey, Post-Apocalypse, Uncomfortable Truths, Worldwide amnesia, fairytale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-17
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2018-03-31 00:14:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3957247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zenthisoror/pseuds/Zenthisoror
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something happened. Nobody remembers what exactly, but something big happened, and everything changed. People are waking up in the shadow of a giant Tree with no memory as to who they are or how they got there. Once their final team member arrives, it's time for a familiar trio to set sail on the desert to look for some answers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Road Trip at the End of the World

**Author's Note:**

> This is potentially the most supremely weird one-shot I have ever written. I thought I would try a challenge - and, boy, was this a challenge. Can you write a character in character when the character doesn't know they are that character and nobody around him knows how they are related to that character to help him? I'm not sure if this story counts as mindscrew. Perhaps it might. I read over it and ended up with four different ways of reading it, but it was an interesting writing experiment, if nothing else.
> 
> So, without further ado, if you read this, good luck. If you reach the end, well done! Best, Zen :D

The first thing he learned on waking up was that, whoever he was, he didn't like construction sites.

It was all noise, dust and sweaty people, all noisily, dustily, sweatily building what seemed to be a street. The people passing by him had far too much energy - in their smiles, in their hammer blows - and too much purpose.

For somebody waking up without any idea as to who they were and how they got there, and was still grasping onto the fact that he had eyes, ears and, thank gods, clothes, it was a little too much.

Some carried silvery strips of wood, others ropes of twisted fibre, and all along the path of trodden down dust, teams were weaving wicker houses, twisting unwieldy wood and fibre together with strong flicks of their fingers. As he looked on, two young men arrived on the scene holding a huge dark blue leaf over their heads like a banner.

Nobody in the crowd showed any surprise at his presence. Perhaps they weren't surprised because he had been standing there all along, but somehow he knew that not to be so.

He felt new and bare, oddly hollow, like a melon scooped to the pith then had the pith picked away and all that had been allowed to remain was the worn thin skin, bruised, scraped and empty, but for a bitter feeling of disappointment _, self-disappointment_ , that stuck to the roof of his mouth like a blood clot and made him sick with anger…

"Hey!"

A boy - blond hair, blue eyes, a crumpled tracksuit of orange and black - had skidded to a stop in front of him, kicking up the dust with his ankles.

The boy immediately broke into a huge white-toothed smile. "You're the one we've been waiting for!"

 _He was?_ "Do you know who I am?"

"No, but I've just got a feeling that you're the last guy we need, that's all. Feelings are pretty important here. They're the closest things anybody has to memories. Anyway, you took your sweet time getting here. Got a name yet?"

He shook his head.

"Great! Guess I'll just have to be the one to name you. You can be," eyes went up and down, "you can be Shay, short for 'shady', because you look like one shady bastard just standing there in the middle of the street, all miserable and broody-looking."

He found himself stepping calmly forwards to seize the idiot's collar in his fists.

"Hey, it was a narrow toss between 'Bastard' and 'Suspicious', alright? And it's only until you remember your real name, so it's nothing serious."

The newly dubbed 'Shay' wasn't mollified in the least. He had woken up angry and disappointed and pressed in all sides by noisy people who acted as if he wasn't there. He wanted do something, fight something, anything, blow off some steam before it got the better of him, and here was this strange young man handing him an excuse to beat him into the dust on a silver platter.

Then another part of him noted that it wasn't worth it. A nickname was a placeholder. It meant nothing compared to his real name and as the moments passed, that anger he had woken up with started to bleed from him like a memory of a dream.

He let go of the young man's collar.

"Man, you've got one lousy temper, but I suppose you've only just woken up. Maybe you're the kind of guy who's a moody prick in the mornings but lightens up as the day goes on."

Somehow, 'Shay' didn't think so. He scowled and his tormentor – yes, that was what he was, his _tormentor_ \- had the gall to point at his face and laugh, but at the sound of his laughter Shay was all of a sudden struck by a thought.

He _knew_ this boy from somewhere, certain as the dust beneath his feet and getting between his toes. He knew him so well that he could almost feel the weight of the boy's name on his tongue, its shape with his mouth.

The boy stretched out his hand, took Shay's and pumped it up and down. "I'm Smiley, by the way. Now, come on. We've been waiting for you to turn up for ages!"

"Who's 'we', and where are we going?"

"You, me and Diamond," said Smiley, as if Shay would find that significant in some way. Perhaps in the past he couldn't remember, it might have been. "We're going on a road trip! To the end of the world!"

* * *

'Road trip' turned out to be a misnomer, as Shay soon discovered, because the desert had no roads, and when Smiley said 'end of the world', what he had really meant was the end of ' _their_ world' – this strange world that Shay had woken up in, this desert of dust and wicker villages in the shadow of a giant tree.

The tree was as wide as mountains and stretched up and up and up still, too high for him to see even if he tipped his head back on his shoulders. Its bark was silver, the same silver as the wood people had been weaving into houses, and its leaves were a dark inky blue like the night. Hanging from its branches were huge rounded fruits that glowed with a pinkish light, and it was small miracle that they did, or else the desert would have been cast into total darkness. Its canopy blocked out the sun and the moon, covered the entire sky in a thick mesh of branches and leaves, and turned the day and night into one dim twilight world.

Time passed and nobody knew it, but they assumed that it did because it simply had to.

Smiley and Diamond said that they needed to do something. They didn't know what, but they said that the answers would be there at the end of their world, where the shadow of the great tree ended and the _real_ world began – where the sun and moon rose and set and people lived _real_ lives.

They were all missing something. More importantly, Smiley and Diamond felt as if they had failed something, and until they knew who, what and how they had failed, there was no rest for them and they didn't feel as if they could help the happy people building their village at the foot of the Tree.

Getting away from the Tree was the key, said Diamond. A world without the tree was the right world. They had lost everything waking up to this desert but whatever had happened to them hadn't washed out the burning conviction that the Tree was wrong and wasn't supposed to be there, casting its twilight shadow.

Whilst Smiley adjusted the sails of their boat and pointed the bowsprit at the horizon line, Diamond filled Shay in. She was a smart girl, straightforward, about the same age as Shay and Smiley with a curious diamond-shaped mark on her forehead that had given her her nickname. She told Shay everything that they knew about their world in a no-nonsense way that he found he appreciated in the circumstances. It made him feel a little less lost and the world a little more real, because from the moment of waking, he hadn't been entirely sure that this wasn't all a dream.

For one thing, they were sailing. The boat was sliding across the silver sands of the desert as if crossing a dusty sea. It ought to have been impossible. A tree the height of the sky ought to have been impossible.

"This boat's made from bark that we peeled off the Tree," Diamond told him with pride, as they drew away from the village. The rudder scraped a thin line into the sand in their wake. "It's the only material left around here to do anything with. We even made the sail from Tree pulp paper. Tree really is the only thing out here."

"What happens if the sail breaks?"

"Nothing!" said Smiley breezily. "It's just there for the look of things. This boat will keep on going because I want it to. It's a weird thing about that Tree. It's like it's trying to give us what we want, or at least what we think we want."

"It makes your dreams real?"

Smiley grinned. "Something like that, I guess. Who knows?"

With the permanent gloom of the shadow, they quickly lost sight of the village that Shay had woken up in. Before he knew it, it became just the three of them in a boat, silently tracking a wasted landscape that reminded him more of the moon than anywhere that people could actually live.

There was no wind. Perhaps the Tree was shielding them from it. There were no boulders, no plants, no animals either. Fallen branches, twigs, and leaves the size of small buildings lay half-buried in the sand. Sometimes Shay thought he saw the shadows shift, flicker as if something had moved in them, but it might have just been settling dust.

"What happened to everything?"

"You mean, to the world?" Smiley shrugged. "Who knows? The first guy who woke up in the village says that the Tree and the desert were already here when he came to. If you're asking about what happened to all the stuff though, you're asking about the Whites."

"The Whites?"

"It's easier to show you one."

Diamond pushed the tiller, and the boat changed its course. It brought them into the shadow of a branch so long and tall it was as if they had come to a line of cliffs, and there, at its base, digging into the sand with a plaintive snuffling noise was what appeared to be a very misshapen human man. It was milk white with gangly limbs. The skin of its stomach was twisted into a large knot like tree bark. Its hair was green, and its eyes, when it lifted its head, glowed round and yellow through the dark.

"That's a White," said Smiley, pointing at the creature, which promptly ignored them and loped off to sniff under another part of the branch, making an odd champing noise with its jaw as if chewing on its own fat tongue. "They're kind of pathetic, but they've done enough damage."

"What do they do?"

"They eat, and that's about it." Smiley touched the side of the boat and it started to move again, and for a few minutes it skimmed the sand alongside the running White. The White didn't even look at them. "The guys who woke up first say that at the start there were whole plants and towns around here, with animals and everything, but then a load of these Whites just appeared one day and started eating. They ate the plants, they ate the animals, they ate the buildings too, and when there was nothing left, they chewed up the rocks, and when they couldn't swallow those rocks, they spat out the dust, and this – " he spread his hand and cast it wide over the desert "- this is what they made."

"But they don't touch the Tree," said Shay, eyeing the glowing fruits above them, "or its bark."

"Or us, oddly enough." Diamond ran a hand through her hair as if she was wishing that there was a wind to tug it like there would have been on the sea. "Nobody's complaining about that though. People say that they don't eat the Tree because it's like their Mother."

"Meaning?"

"They hatched from it. Who knows how?"

It said something about this odd world that Shay had come into that white swirly zombies hatching out from trees probably didn't sound as ridiculous as it should have done. Diamond couldn't explain why the Whites didn't eat people. She didn't seem to know. Maybe it would be one of the things they would find out at the end of the world.

* * *

As they sailed over the desert, occasionally changing course to navigate around a giant leaf or between islands of fallen wood, Shay listened to Smiley and Diamond bicker and searched the land they passed for something that he was missing, he wasn't sure what.

Something was very wrong about what he was seeing and something else was telling him that the answer was right in front of his very nose. The thought made him restless, and given how Diamond and Smiley hadn't seem able to stop chattering (arguing) about what they hoped would be there at the edge of the shadow, he had a feeling that they felt the same.

Suddenly, Shay stood up, and the boat rocked beneath his feet, almost pitching the three of them out into the sand. Diamond screamed and ducked to avoid the swinging boom. Smiley, however, wasn't so lucky. The boom caught him across the waist and tossed him off the boat.

Spitting sand and swearing, Smiley crawled back to them on all fours. "Whoa, give us some warning next time! What's up?"

"A village."

"What? Where?"

"Over there."

Smiley followed the line of Shay's pointing finger and squinted. "I don't see anything."

"My eyes are better than most people's."

Diamond pricked her ears. "Is that something you remember?"

"No. It's just a feeling." He turned to Smiley. "But that's enough, isn't it?"

Smiley paused in clambering back into the boat and his smile, for a moment, seemed strained. "Right, sure, it's enough, but," he pulled a face, "it would have been cool if you had remembered something from before the Tree. Nobody's managed it yet."

"Nobody?"

"Not even their real name. At least, nobody we know." Smiley put his hands on his hips and considered the shadows in which Shay had spotted the village. "Maybe in other places, they've got people who've cracked it, why our memories are all screwed. I sure don't remember anything. I just woke up screaming and nobody could tell me why."

"I woke up crying," Diamond recalled, looking faintly embarrassed. "I don't remember anything either, so it was a bit of a shock for me, but at least the feeling faded quickly."

The thought of their missing memories reminded Shay of that hollow, sucked dry husk feeling inside. It made him more than a little unsettled, so he cleared his throat before he could dwell on it: "We don't have any food, we don't have any water."

"We don't. Your point is?"

"Do you honestly think we can do a road trip without either?"

"Sure we can. Have you felt hungry or thirsty since waking up?"

Shay was about to snort, snap something along the lines of an adrenaline rush, or being too taken by surprise by the road trip to even think about his stomach, when he realised that Smiley was right. They had been sailing for none of them knew precisely how long, but for a considerable enough length of time in a parched and arid desert waste. If not hunger, thirst ought to have been a problem long before he saw the village, and yet he felt nothing at all.

"I'm right, aren't I?" Smiley looked smug, and Shay decided not to punch him, because he needed to hear the explanation. "You haven't felt hungry or thirsty since you came to. Hey, don't worry, it's not just you. It's all of us. None of us have to worry about eating or drinking, or even sleeping. This guy back at the village tried to sleep and couldn't even lie still to do it."

"How?"

"A lot of people say it's the lights." Diamond pointed up to the branches, where a cluster of fruits hung above them like moons. "They say that they're emitting a special kind of energy and we're all absorbing it, but I'm not convinced really."

Smiley turned to Shay with a grin. "If you're right about this mirage village – "

"I am right and it is _not_ a mirage."

"- then maybe it'd be good to go there and see what the people are like."

Diamond and Shay agreed and the boat changed course, its paper sail creaking like an old vellum scroll.

When they drew nearer to what looked like a jumble of giant logs, Smiley gave a low whistle. "Looks like your eyes were special after all."

Shay said nothing but added one more to a tally he was keeping until it was justifiable to shove Smiley face first into the sand.

"So many people," gasped Diamond, leaning out over the edge of the boat to get a good look at the settlement. "Look at their houses."

From the angle of their approach they could see three long logs, possibly all pieces of what had once been a single branch half-sunken into the sand. Each one had been hollowed out. Lines of windows had been cut into their walls and soft pink light like that emitted by the fruits shone out of the doorways.

The logs and the roads in between them were crammed with people, and there was music jangling in the air in the air, and shouts of laughter - bright and happy sounds that made the three wonder if they had sailed into the midst of a festival.

No sooner were they in sight of the town when they were spotted, apparently by a reveller who had been singing on one of the rooftops. There was a small commotion as somebody was sent for, and dragged out of the largest log.

"Hello there!" called the man. "Sailors on the desert? That's a rare sight to see. Who are you? What do you want?"

Smiley brought the boat to a stop in front of him. Shay noted that the other members of this community were hanging back, several metres behind their leader.

"We're travelling, sir," said Diamond, raising her voice over the swirls of strings and plucked instruments coming from the logs. "We're from nearer to the Tree's trunk, a new village."

Shay caught mutters from amongst the crowd. 'Another new village?' somebody whispered, 'They're springing up like mushrooms the closer you get to the trunk'. 'Where are all these people coming from?' asked another, which Shay thought was a rather reasonable thing to ask.

"I see, I see, and where are you going?" asked the leader, casting his eye over their boat.

Smiley answered, "To the edge of the Tree's shadow."

The leader frowned. "Why?"

"For the sheer heck of doing it, that's why. Why wouldn't you want to go?"

"Young man, the people who go to the edge of the shadow don't come back."

Smiley stuck out his jaw and looked intensely stubborn. "Yeah? Well, maybe it's because they don't want to come back."

"Perhaps, but why throw your life away into uncertainty when you can have this?" The leader gestured at the town behind him, at the shadows of dancers weaving through the logs, at the twinkling lights in the windows. "We have no more need to eat, sleep or drink, and I have lived here long enough now to know that we do not age. Nobody gets sick and nobody dies. There is no need to work. We are free to play, make music, dance - be happy forever. These are our gifts, as people who live in the shadow of the Tree. Why try to leave?"

Smiley's grip on the mast tightened. "Because, I don't know about you, but I don't believe there's such a thing as a free lunch, and those 'gifts' of yours kind of sound like 'bribes' to me."

"What about your memories?" Diamond had been looking around the crowd with an almost painful hope. "Does anybody here remember what things were like before?"

The leader burst into laughter. "Oh no! None of us remember anything about before! Not a single shred of who we were, what happened or how we came to be here, but I think you would agree that two, three or four decades worth of memories is a small price to pay for a thousand and more memories to come."

There were murmurs of agreement from the crowd and Shay had had enough.

He tapped his knuckles against the side of the boat to get Smiley's attention. "There's nothing here for us to know. Let's go."

"I would implore you to stay." The leader seemed to be genuinely concerned. He had a kind, worn face, the kind of face that could dot a mantelpiece in many a happy family photograph. "There is nothing at the edge of the shadow that you cannot find inside it – friends and family, they can all be made anew. What does it matter if we don't remember the past? If we accept and live in this new present, soon we will be making a _new_ past."

Smiley grimaced. "Thanks for the offer, old man, but not today."

The leader sighed and, in the end, dipped his head in a bow. "In which case, I wish you all the best of luck and a safe journey. Take care that you keep an eye out for the Whitehunters. They've been playing with bows and arrows lately and they're always itching to try out their new toys."

Diamond gasped. "You mean that there are people out here who can kill Whites?"

"Why, yes, there are, young lady. Didn't you know?"

"But that's impossible!"

"Well, the Whitehunters have made weapons that apparently do the trick." The leader smiled, apparently amused by her enthusiasm, but the smile quickly faded to annoyance. "They have good intentions, but they have a poor habit of mistaking almost anything moving on the desert for a White, although I could imagine that it's hardly their fault. These light levels do not make things easy for them."

Assuring the leader that they would keep an eye out for jumpy Whitehunters and return from the edge of the shadow with all the answers they hoped for, Smiley set the boat in motion again and the leader didn't try to stop them. The crowd waved them goodbye and, now that the novel distraction had gone away, returned to their eternal party.

* * *

They were back in the desert again, and for all of Smiley's smiles the mood on the boat was pensive.

"Just why are we doing this?" demanded Shay after a long silence, if only to distract him from the feeling of _wrongness_ that crept up on him every time he stared at the sands for too long. "You said that were you two were waiting for me. Why?"

If they were doing this trip simply for the sake of seeing it done, why had they needed to wait for him at all? They didn't him to find their answers. They didn't need him if they just wanted to wander the desert.

"The road trip was my idea initially," spoke up Diamond, after a pause. "I thought it would be nice for us to spend some time together, with just the three of us. It was the very first thought I had when I woke – 'I wish I'd had more time with just the three of us together' – except I didn't know who I was looking for until I found Smiley, and then he found you."

She laughed to herself and looked up at the fruits in the branches. "I think in the time before, there were just so many things - so many terrible, awful things going on - that we never had the chance, so I wanted to make up for it."

So the road trip was Diamond's way of laying a regret to rest – a very personal regret, the sort of regret that easily got washed away in the face of grand world-changing events, like the sprouting of a giant tree, or perhaps overlooked in the face of war or whatever had happened to wipe out mankind's memories, but here, under the shadow, without the memory of the world, it was the small and personal that defined every person for who they were, and all they had to act upon.

"I think we were friends," Diamond went on, although Shay thought she sounded as if she was trying to convince herself. "Good friends."

Sand blew up his nose. Shay sneezed. "No."

Diamond looked momentarily dismayed. "What? But, that can't be right! I – "

Shay looked to Smiley, who had said nothing during the exchange, partially because he had been concentrating on the steering the boat along the edge of a dune, but partially because Shay suspected, if that silly grin was anything to go by, that Smiley agreed with Shay.

Not 'good friends', but 'best friends'.

* * *

The boat sailed on.

For a long while, there was little to do but enjoy each other's company, if enjoy was the word for it.

If it was, then 'enjoy' was also the word for all the squabbles over the boat's direction or whether they were actually getting anywhere at all, Shay going so far as to suggest that Smiley was taking them around in circles.

'Enjoy' was the word for dodging huge chunks of wood and splinters the size of bigger than their boat falling down from the branches above and choking on the clouds of sand they sent up, and the word for a seamless twilight of comparing feelings, taking solace in company against the deep, hollow, scooped out pit inside.

'Enjoy' was the word for the time they parked the boat at the bottom of a log that had sunken vertically into the sand and raced each other up the side of it, feet clinging to wood as they sped to its jagged top, shaking dust out of its grooves, and even though they hadn't raced before, the final result of Diamond reaching the top before either Smiley or Shay had an echo of warm familiarity.

And still there was something wrong with the picture. Shay couldn't pin his finger on it, but he knew that he was missing something. There was something about a windless desert that still managed to have shifting dunes and wind patterns scored into the sand that was simply _wrong._

A piercing whistle was their only warning before wood chips sprayed from the mast, the sails tore and the boat had sprouted arrows from its sides.

"Hold fire!" somebody called, once Smiley had finished shouting and yelling in angry indignation over his boat's shredded sail. "They're not Whites! They're just a bunch of human kids."

"Again?" cried another voice. A dark spot appeared at the crest of the nearest dune. "Damn, you're right."

"Damn straight we're humans!" Smiley shouted back. "What was that for? Are you guys crazy?"

"Sorry, mate," called down another unseen figure from somewhere in the circle around them, "it's these light levels. They're lousy for working out what's a White or not. We thought your boat might be a new breed of White or something. Can't be too careful these days."

With that, a man stepped out from behind his dune and stuck his longbow into the sand. He waved his hands above his head. "On behalf of the Third Band of Whitehunters, we apologise for shooting at you and your boat! We do honestly try to avoid shooting people, but the lighting's not much of a help here." He paused then added sheepishly, "Could we come and retrieve our arrows?"

Diamond was glowering, apparently not amused in the slightest by the Whitehunter attack, but Smiley nodded and let the Whitehunters come.

There were three men and two women in the Band, each one carrying a longbow and a quiver full of arrows, which were little more than long, slim, sharpened splinters, split from the inside of a piece of Tree probably. After that every person seemed to have accumulated an array of Tree splinters personalised for their own use. One man had a thick splinter the length and thickness of Shay's arm that had been sharpened to a point like a sword but could easily double as a bludgeon.

The head of the Band was referred to by the others as Chief. Whilst his men tried to ease their precious arrows from the boat without snapping them, the Chief turned to Smiley. "Don't see many travellers about, especially kids. Where are you headed?"

Smiley told them and the Chief pulled a face as if he had inhaled a mouthful of sand. "To the edge of the shadow? You sure?"

They assured him that they were. The Chief sighed and scratched the side of his face. "Well, I'm not going to stop you. If that's the way you feel you need to go, go for it, although you do hear mighty strange things about folk who go to the edge. Fifth Band went out that way following a pack of Whites and nobody's seen bark nor twig of the Fifth since."

Diamond leaned out of the boat to ask, "Do you really kill Whites?"

The Chief proudly held up his longbow. "That we do!"

"But everybody told us it was impossible! People have tried attacking the Whites and the White just – " Diamond made an airy, wafting movement with her hands "- slip right through their attacks, like they turn into ghosts just as you try to touch them."

"Ah! And then people gave up, didn't they? But not us Whitehunters! We're travelling to spread the news. All you need to take out a White is the right kit." An unsettling glint danced in the Chief's eye as he showed her the arrows. "Wood from the Tree. It was easy as that. Nobody tried it because, after that news got out about the Whites' ghosting trick, most people were too damn smart to dare! But if you stake them through with pieces of Tree," the Chief made a violent stabbing motion with an arrow, "the stake sticks."

Shay raised his eyebrows. "And they die?"

"They die alright. Gurgling like they're singing on water." The Chief's grin was feral. His eyes flickered to the dunes around them. "It's sweet payback for what they did to our world."

"Do you think pieces of the Tree work because the Whites came from the Tree as well?" Diamond speculated eagerly.

"Well, if you want the Whitehunter theory, I can give it to you, although you've got to promise not to laugh." Smiley and Diamond gave the Chief their heartfelt promises. Shay remained silent, but the Chief seemed to assume that the other two spoke for him as well.

Suitably assured, the Chief slung his bow up onto his shoulder and looked up to the branches above them. "Well, our theory is that that Tree, it's not all from our world. Look at it, that freak of a thing. Look at how goddam big it is. You see how high it grows? I'd bet my real name that its roots go just as deep, and with all those fruits shining up there like moons, you don't have to be a genius to tell that that ain't natural, so we say that it's part from the spirit world too, or dream world, some place different from here anyhow. The Whites can turn into ghosts like they do because they're like the Tree." He tapped his bow on his shoulder and pursed his lips. "The Whites are part ghost, you see. That's why none of us can touch them, because we're not made from the same stuff as they are, but with wood from the Tree that's part ghost like they are? It's a whole different story!"

Diamond frowned and if she was having doubts, Shay agreed with her. The Chief's theory was a load of cobbled together mysticism. It couldn't be right. If only things of the 'same kind of reality' as the Chief said could actually have any physical effect on each other, then it ought to have worked both ways. If the humans couldn't harm the Whites because they were from some another world, the Whites shouldn't have been able to harm things in the human world either –they shouldn't have been able to eat the world to dust.

"So," the Chief clapped his hands together and looked between the three in the boat, "if you guys are travelling, could you do us a small favour? If you see anybody else out there, would you tell them how to kill the Whites?"

They told him that they would tell anybody who cared to listen and the Chief seemed satisfied. "We've got to spread the word! If we kill off enough of those square-toothed scum, we might get things growing again and this whole place will go back to how it used to be – don't care if its miles and miles of grass or acres of forest. Anything's better than this dead waste."

He spat at the sand and scuffed over the spot with his heel.

"You know what? The funny thing is, they make it so easy. The damn Whites don't even try to fight back. You can shout at them, run at them, jump out naked in front of one of them all you like. Until you stab one through, they won't even look at you, and when they look, even then," the Chief stopped the tapping his bow against his shoulder and shook his head, "they're not seeing you, not really. Daft creatures. Daft damned ghosts."

* * *

They left the Whitehunters in the sand bowl, losing sight of them when the boat crested a dune and slipped down the other side.

"Don't know about you guys," Smiley broke the silence, "but something about fighting things that don't fight back doesn't sound all that great."

"They did have a point though." Diamond tucked up her legs beneath her and looked thoughtful. "If we got rid of all the Whites, we'll be one step closer to getting our world back to the way it was."

"But is that necessarily a good thing?" At their blank looks, Shay sighed. "How can you know that the world before wasn't worse than the world now?"

"Are you serious?" Smiley waved at the expanse of grey, gloom and sand around them. "This whole place is totally dead. It's nothing and nobody does anything. What could be worse than this?"

Shay scowled and turned to Diamond. "You said that you had a feeling that horrible things had happened, horrible things that kept us all apart. The most obvious 'horrible thing' that gets in the way of people and forces them to divide is something that makes people take sides – for instance, a war, or perhaps several wars that all came to a head, and this," _this world of nothing, "_ is the result."

This desert with its pale light and glittering dunes was peaceful and all of its people were blank slates again. Nobody remembered their pasts so nobody remembered its pains. Grudges, debts, blood feuds and regrets had been set aside for a chance to begin anew, and until they accumulated again, war wouldn't occur for a long time.

Sand brushed against the rudder.

"Maybe we were on different sides." A cold amusement crawled up Shay's chest, tickled like a spider under his skin. "Maybe there were times when we even tried to kill each other."

"I don't want to think about things like that." Diamond's face was pinched and pale in the shadow. "So what if we were on different sides? So what if we did try to…kill each other at some point? What does it matter? We're together now."

"And you feel it too, don't you?" Smiley turned from his place by the mast and tapped his chest, and Shay would have known exactly what he was talking about even if Smiley hadn't gone on. "The hollow feeling. If you feel that, and I feel that, and Diamond feels that – and we all share that same feeling, then I think it's pretty obvious that if we did all fall apart at some point, we all came back together when it mattered, right?"

Diamond smiled. She liked the sound of that, and, to his own surprise, so did Shay, although he couldn't help but wonder, if they had come back together to fight against something, did that make this hollowness, combined with that bitter blood-clot of disappointment and echo of anger inside him, the feeling of _defeat_?

* * *

How long had they been travelling? Shay wasn't sure, but there was something in the air that hadn't been there before – a sharp thrill in the skin, a simultaneous push-pull that enticed like the smell of the sea.

They came across another village. This time, its people lived in caves they had scooped into the side of a log. They said that they had a White problem, where the Whites had a habit of poking their noses into their caves and wandering into their homes, which wasn't a danger as such, but it was easy to imagine that it wasn't pleasant to have Whites constantly ghosting through.

Diamond told the people what the Whitehunters had said, about fashioning weapons out of Tree to kill the Whites, but the head of the cave village shook her head.

"Thank you, young lady, but the Whitehunters' way is not our way. We are peaceful people. We will have to learn to tolerate the Whites." She smiled and glanced around her cave with a sparkle of pride in her eyes. "This is a village of peace and I shall keep it that way."

Smiley suddenly sighed and crossed his arms behind his head. "A village of peace – that sure does sound nice."

"Well, you are welcome to stay here if you wish," the head of the village was quick to say. "Now that we no longer need for earthly things, all that is left is the spiritual, after all. Here, you will live in peace and you will have all the time you need to come to peace with yourselves. You are travelling to the edge of the shadow, aren't you? Oh, I can tell. It's as plain as the trunk of the Tree at the shadow's heart." She laughed at their expressions of surprise. "You are not the first to go to the edge. We are the final village – the penultimate stop, if you will. We've seen all sorts come through here, but the ones going on to the edge of the shadow always have the same kind of _smell_ about them. They're restless. They're lost. They've got something to prove, and so, I say the same thing to all of them. I tell them that there's no need to try anymore and that what has happened has happened, and that they were not to blame."

Smiley, Diamond and Shay looked at each other, then Smiley blurted, "But what if we _were_ to blame?"

The head of the village burst into soft peals of laughter. "And that is how every single one of those people replied. Go on to the edge, young man, I know better than to try and stop you here."

"We were told that nobody comes back from the edge," said Shay, watching the head of the village closely. "You will still let us go?"

"What else can I do? I shan't stop you, and it isn't entirely true that nobody comes back from the edge. We had one man come back and settle amongst us once."

"You did?" Smiley exclaimed, leaping to his feet. "That's great! Is he still here? Can we meet him?"

The head of the village's lips curled up and, for a moment, her expression turned distant. "I wish that you could have met him. He was a quite the character, but happily for him, he is no longer with us."

"Where did he go?"

She smiled again, a calm, accepting, passive smile. "He found peace within himself and no longer needed to stay among us. I do not know where he went."

When it became clear that the head of the village could tell them no more, they returned to their boat. Smiley touched the mast, Diamond put her hand to the tiller, Shay adjusted the sail and they were on their way again, on what was apparently the last length of their journey, or their 'road trip' that wasn't really a 'road trip', despite how much Smiley insisted that it was.

The landscape changed. The great dunes that had divided up around the Tree's roots tapered away. The sands smoothed, still rippled as if stroked by a wind, but on the whole they were flat. There were fewer logs, fewer leaves and splinters of tree, and after a time, a long red line appeared on the horizon stretched out like a glowing wire.

It was the gap between the land and the lowest branches of the Tree and through that gap was shining sunlight.

It was the most beautiful thing they had seen since their journey began and the most awful, because it was as the desert became steadily brighter that Shay finally _knew_.

"Stop the boat."

"Huh? Why?"

"Stop it now."

"You're chickening out on us now?"

Shay stood and jumped off the boat.

The sudden movement had exactly the effect he had planned – the boat rocked, the boom swung, and, missing the top of Diamond's head by a hair's breadth, smacked Smiley in the belly to sweep him onto the sand.

The boat ground to a halt.

"What the hell are you doing?" shouted Smiley, spitting out sand and pushing himself up to his feet. "You're giving up on us now? We're so close to the edge you can actually _see_ it! What's got into you? We're doing this together - "

"Shadows."

"What?"

"That's what's been wrong with us the whole time. The shadows. Look."

Shay pointed at the boat. Red light spotting through the torn sail, the boat cast a tattered shadow onto the sand.

Then Shay pointed down at his own two feet. The sand around Shay was red with the light from the shadow's edge and blank as an empty page.

Blank.

Smiley stared, closed his eyes, scrubbed them with his fists and looked again.

Shay didn't have a shadow.

Smiley swallowed, suddenly cold. He looked down at himself.

He didn't have a shadow either.

Ice slid through Smiley's veins and chilled the dread in his stomach until it felt heavy as lead. "Shay, how long had you noticed?"

"From the start. The light levels under the Tree were too dim to tell properly until now, but – "

Smiley looked sick. "Your eyes are better than ours, right?"

Shay met his gaze with a grimace. "Right."

"What are you two doing?"

Diamond had climbed out of the boat and neither was surprised to see that she too didn't have a shadow.

Smiley gave her a watery smile and pointed at the boat then down to Diamond's feet. "Spot the difference."

It didn't take long for Diamond to understand. She stared at the sand with wide, wide eyes. "That's impossible."

Smiley laughed. "Apparently not."

"Is this why we feel like the way we do? Why we don't have our memories?" Diamond demanded, glancing between the two boys, at the boat, at the sky, at the red streak of sunlight, anything but the empty sand at her feet. "Because we don't have our shadows?"

No. It was simpler than that.

As Shay stood back in silence and gave Smiley and Diamond space to work it out, his thoughts turned back to what the head of the cave village had told them. Was this what the woman had meant by 'finding peace'? To come to this realisation?

"We touch the Whites, our hands pass straight through them," Smiley murmured to himself. He looked at his own two hands. "They don't even see us when we're standing in front of them. We don't need to eat, or drink, or sleep. We don't age or get sick. We just keep going."

"The Whites aren't the ghosts here, are they?" Diamond's voice was shaking. The fists she had raised to her chest were trembling. "We're the ghosts. Aren't we, Shay?"

The boat's sail creaked in a breeze that none of them could feel.

Shay gave her small, stiff nod. With a threadbare 'Oh', she sank quietly to her knees. Beside her, Smiley stood with his hands on his hips, gazing down at his feet with a scowl as if trying to _will_ a shadow into existence.

Then all of a sudden he was rushing forward and planting a fist in Shay's face. Knuckles collided with a crack and lifted him off his feet.

When Shay staggered upright, Smiley was shaking out his hand and grinning. "That didn't feel like punching a ghost to me."

Nursing his jaw, Shay narrowed his eyes and swung his own fist to send Smiley spinning face down into the sand, noting that it wasn't as nearly satisfying as Shay had thought it would be.

"No." Shay stood over him with his fist raised. "It didn't, but I am right and you know it."

Smiley swore as he climbed to his feet again. The ground where he had fallen was smooth and undisturbed, as if he had never landed in the sand at all.

"You told me that feelings are everything here," Shay went on when Smiley refused to look at him, as if he blamed Shay for all of this, for finally knowing. "Then check your feelings when I say this, _Naruto._ "

Naruto – yes, that was his name, that was his goddam stupid _real name_ – froze on the spot as if struck by lightning then hammered into it with a giant icicle. "What did you call me?"

"We died, _Naruto."_ Shay spat out the name like a curse, perhaps because the boy in the time before – their _life -_ had been a curse, _his curse,_ always on his footsteps, always an unforgettably irritating irreplaceable thorn in his side, dug in so irreversibly deep at some point it had become part of him. "We fought together, and we lost, and because we lost, everybody lost. Everybody died and _we died too._ "

"We fought the Tree," said Diamond, scrunching up her face as if she were struggling to pull up her words from a deep well of tar. "Or the people who wanted the Tree to grow. We fought them and lost. When we lost, everybody was stuck in a dream of some kind, and we were put in it too, and, whilst we were all sleeping, the Tree sucked everybody dry of everything that made them who they were, and when it was done, all that was left of people were their bodies and - "

"Everybody's bodies became the Whites," finished Shay, hating that warm chime of certainty that came from inside that told him he was _right._ "And now we're all here."

Ghosts wandering in the twilight beneath the bows of a giant Tree.

Feelings lingering on in the ruins of a lost world.

It was a bitter pill to swallow, to think that the 'ghostly' Whites were more real than they were.

"What about all this then?" Naruto swept his hand towards the boat, at the thin line its rudder had left in the sand. "The houses, the villages, those Whitehunters' weapons – all of this stuff people have made. Ghosts can't do that! How come we can?"

Shay shrugged. "Maybe the Whitehunters were almost right. Who knows?"

"''Who knows?'? What do you mean, 'Who knows?'? You've been doing a pretty good job pretending you do so far!" Naruto flung up his hands as if in fury, but to Shay it looked a little desperate. "'Who knows?'! Is that the best you can come out with, Sasuke? Hell, we might as well call this 'Who knows World'. Everything's a goddam 'Who knows?'. Who knows if you, me and Sakura aren't real? Who knows if we're alive or dead? Who knows what the hell we're even doing here?"

Shay – no, _Sasuke_ , that was his name, but it did nothing to ease the hollowness gnawing at his insides, brought no gift of memories as he had secretly hoped – met Naruto's gaze and held it. " _You_ know."

_You know that you are dead, and that are you dead because you failed._

They did know, deep down, both Naruto and Sakura, except Sakura was fervently wishing that she didn't know and hadn't known until they had all three reached the edge of the shadow when their trip would have come to its end, and, for Naruto, simply knowing was never going to cut it, because he _also_ knew that whenever somebody imposed anything on him and tried to make him _accept_ it, that was when he had to fight back.

So, there was a stubborn glint in Naruto's eyes, a grin on his face that was partially a grimace, and all bloody-minded refusal to bow, even as he knew, and knew there was nothing that could be done about what he knew.

Naruto looked up at the Tree and, shaking his head, laughed. "The first word I said after I woke up was 'Sorry'. Guess I know why now, since we let everyone down."

Naruto went back to the boat. When he tried to wipe the windblown sand off the bowsprit, the sand stayed resolutely where it was as if Naruto hadn't even touched it.

He called over his shoulder: "So, on to the edge of the shadow?"

Sakura hesitated then broke into a smile that might, on a happier day, been of relief. "On to the edge!"

Sasuke said nothing and made his way to the boat.

* * *

When they reached the edge of the shadow, it was sunset.

The sky beyond the branches was a bowl of beaten copper, the desert beyond the shadow was a rippled sheet of bronze, and hung in between the two of them was half of a setting sun.

They stopped the boat some distance from the edge and walked the final few hundred metres, turning their faces to the sun.

Sakura toed the shadow line like she might a wave on a beach. "What happens now?"

"We go back," Naruto replied, crossing his arms and looking out over the red desert. "We go back and tell everybody what we worked out coming here."

Sasuke raised his eyebrows. "That we're dead?"

"Yeah. Especially that." Naruto nodded in agreement. "People really ought to know whether they're dead or alive, or not. It's kind of important."

Sakura paused in examining the edge and stared at Naruto. " _Kind of_ important?"

"Well, we shouldn't be hanging around in the world still, should we? Maybe if we tell people that they're already dead, they'll be able to make their way properly over to…wherever we're supposed to be going. Then," Naruto punched his fist into his other hand, "we'll tell them that we're sorry, for losing against the Tree."

Sasuke rolled his eyes. "As if that will go down well with anybody."

Naruto shrugged. "Well, what else can we say?"

A plume of sand swirled languidly towards them. It passed through their bodies in a whisper of red-gold grains, and the wind blew by without ruffling a single hair on their heads.

Sakura stepped out into the sunset desert, then turned to face the two boys in the shadow with a thin-lipped smile. "Maybe we shouldn't tell them anything at all. Just think about it. People seemed happy, didn't they? Making new lives under the Tree – new, peaceful, happy lives. If they want to live like that, who are we to try and stop them when we've failed everybody once already? What good would it do anybody to know they're dead?"

Naruto opened his mouth to reply, but, to everybody's surprise, including his own, Sasuke answered first.

"Would you rather everybody lived in a peace that was built on the back of a lie?" he heard himself say, and it sounded quiet under the rush of the wind and sand. "Would you take away their choice to decide for themselves what to believe?"

"We wouldn't be taking away any choices! They could always decide to come out to the edge of the shadow and work things out for themselves!" Sakura retorted, but there was a tremor in her voice that said she was clutching at reeds. She shook her head furiously and sighed. "I just don't know how I'm going to face anybody like this, knowing the things we know now."

"You'll face them the way we face things best." Stepping over the edge of the shadow, Naruto went to stand beside Sakura on the glowing sand. He gave her a fierce grin. "With the three of us together. Right, Sasuke?"

How could Naruto say that? None of them remembered anything of what the three of them had ever achieved together, if they had achieved anything at all! How could Naruto sound so sure?

Sasuke opened to his mouth to demand just that when he saw something that made all the words slip away from him, leaving him dumb and staring.

"What's up?" Naruto blinked and squinted at him. "Is it something on my face? Oh! I get it! You only just noticed these?" He tapped at the marks on his face, three on each side, like whiskers, and laughed. "Don't ask me what they are, because I don't know either, but if you've only noticed them, hah! So much for your 'special eyes', Sasuke!"

They were fading. Naruto and Sakura were _fading._ That was the only way Sasuke could describe it.

In the red light of the sunset, their shapes seemed to be wavering. Their edges were less defined. Their colours were seeping out. In a matter of seconds, Sasuke could see straight through Naruto's chest to the sloping dunes beyond him.

"Hey, Sasuke, come over here. Don't you want to look at the sky properly? It's so wide!"

They were losing substance, one moment looking like smoke, the next like panes of sliding water as the sunlight poured right through them.

"Why are you staying in that miserable shadow? We've got light and wind and sand in our pants here, Sasuke! You're missing out on _freedom."_

"Sasuke-kun, are you coming to this side?"

He took a single step forward and stopped with his toes on the edge.

What was wrong with them? What had happened to all their plans to go back into the shadow? Why were they vanishing before his very eyes and seemed to be expecting him to vanish with them? Was that what they wanted from him? Was that what he wanted?

He stood at the edge on the balls of his feet, rocking to his ankles and back to the balls of his feet again, and just when he felt that he knew what to do and raised his foot, he realised that Naruto and Sakura's voices had become indistinguishable from the wind.

His two friends were gone.

It was strange. He had been watching them the whole time as they spoke to him, coaxed him, tried to cajole him into crossing over, before vanishing before his very eyes, and yet, he couldn't remember exactly when they had happened.

He felt numb, hollow, and now numbly hollow. He set down his foot behind the line and looked back over his shoulder, at the boat in the distance.

People should know the truth. That was something that he believed in, could hold firm to. They should be told the whole truth, and then left to decide what to make of it for themselves.

Should he go back to tell everybody the truth that the three of them had learned?

What if it was a truth that couldn't simply be told, but which each individual needed to find out for themselves? What if there was no point in Sasuke returning to the shadow at all, because, to be fair, who would believe him? Who would _want_ to believe that they were dead and that their sucked dry husk was a White? And if he couldn't make the people believe that they were dead, then why would they even accept an apology for their deaths?

What if all that was left for him in the shadow was a long, lonely eternity of wandering, telling all he met what he knew, only to see his words go in one ear and out the other and have his efforts wasted?

The desert ahead glowed like a pan of embers and the Tree's shadow clung to his heels.

Could he alone face all the people that the three of them had failed?

At the edge of the shadow, he watched the sun set.

Night would be falling soon. When the moon rose, he would make his decision.

He wondered if the moon would be full.


End file.
